The 1978 Ozploitation horror flick, Patrick, had an irresistible plot about a psychopathic but comatose patient who becomes obsessed with a pretty nurse and takes over a sinister hospital using telekinesis. It's not hard to see why it has come up for the remake treatment.

Re-doing classic films is rarely a good idea – indeed it's often disastrous – but as Steven Soderbergh demonstrated with Ocean's Eleven, remaking flawed movies can be productive, especially when the source material is a neat concept that somehow failed in the translation.

Richard Franklin and Everett De Roche's original Patrick is one of the more widely celebrated of the gleefully disreputable genre movies that Australia produced in the 1970s and '80s – although seen in the harsh light of today it looks more of an ingenious yet frustrating curio than a classic, and also feels surprisingly tame. Though Franklin, its director, would go on to make the supremely effective thriller Road Games, at this stage he was still a novice who fluffed some key scenes, a near-drowning bizarrely set to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring being an especially unfortunate example.

Wisely omitting that scene this time is a creative team headed by Mark Hartley, making his debut as a fiction director after garnering much deserved attention for his infectious documentary on the Ozploitation era, Not Quite Hollywood. While remaining faithful to Patrick's original story in spirit, he and his screenwriters have made some bold changes in storyline and style, including the ramping-up of blood and gore to suit contemporary tastes.

While Franklin's tale played out in bright lights in homage to Alfred Hitchcock, Hartley plumps for the more traditional Gothic horror vibe – mist, thunder, dark shadows… and pretty much everything else bar a looming butler named Igor. The hospital in which Charles Dance's sinister Dr Roget conducts dastardly experiments on comatose patients is identical to the one in the first film, only transplanted from suburban Melbourne to an isolated park; nearby lurks a lighthouse. (Although oddly we never do hear the nearby sea – why is that?) Into this rather familiar spook-o-rama wanders Sharni Vinson's innocent new nurse, Kathy Jacquard, who proves a tougher cookie than she looks, especially up against Rachel Griffiths' outlandishly gloomy authority figure, Nurse Cassidy.

In another shift, eponymous patient Patrick is now a darkly handsome young man (Jason Gallagher) instead of Robert Thompson's original's bug-eyed weirdo, and the revelation of his sinister backstory is shifted from the opening scene to the end. All of this serves to make him more sympathetic (until, suddenly, he isn't) and underlines that this is, above all else, a twisted love story.

The film's major error is to over-egg the shocks and start them way too early - Aussie hit Wolf Creek worked so well partly because it made viewers wait for the horror to appear. Macabre-looking characters are constantly appearing behind Nurse Kathy unannounced, an event invariably accompanied by overstated musical cues. It might make viewers jump, but it's corny stuff.

Hartley no doubt thought he'd scored a coup in hiring Italian composer Pino Donaggio, a genre veteran with credits including Brian de Palma's Carrie and Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, but the by-the-numbers score merely arouses the comfort of familiarity – not really the best way of unsettling an audience.

Yet rescuing the film from its weakness for cliche is its strong cast, with Dance – the go-to guy for condescending hauteur – a huge improvement on the original's campy Robert Helpmann. Vinson makes a convincingly feisty heroine, Peta Sergeant is a livewire as her chief ally, Nurse Williams, while Griffiths rescues a potentially over-the-top character by underplaying.

Scoff, you may, at the moments reeking of Camembert, but the extended climax is a satisfying onslaught of madness and mayhem that should leave viewers suitably drenched in perspiration.